Highway
Now:
I think that when I was composing this piece, I had some (vague, at least) idea of the composition I was seeking. That drove me to produce it.
The unfortunate part is that I had no idea what to use when filling in those compositional elements. Something dark in this lower corner of the image? An amorphous blob. Color? Er, yes! To bad they’re all over the place (in every sense of the word). Value? That means something in a visual design sense?
Ah, strangely it feels sort of good to MST3K my own work. Perhaps I’ve moved on from this level, though it might be hard to tell since I’ve also moved away from making 3d images, primarily due to time constraints. If I had the time, and could remember what Tom Servo’s profile looked like, I’d add an MST3K silhouette mouseover to this image.
Then:
Another of my interpretations of cyberspace, I imagined a glowing virtual city at the end of a data path, with a security portal standing in the way to keep out unauthorized visitors. Isolated systems float on their islands, and the mesh in the background might be a lower-level network like a local phone grid.
By this time, I had finally saved up the cash for some really amazing graphics software, 3D Studio Max R2. This is one of the first images I created with my new software, after a number of simple tests that aren’t worth showing here. While building this scene I had my first real introduction to the material editor, and some of the materials in this scene were simply thrown together depending on whatever struck me as exciting. My excuse for the result is that the scene depicts a garish cyberspace landscape where different systems might have totally clashing icons (which makes me think of the Netrunner card Restrictive Net Zoning). This scene was done without actual lighting, just the default shading, and I added the lens flare in Corel Photo-Paint. Actually, I never quite finished Highway, I meant to add a little eye to the pyramid, but I never got around to painting the map for it.
This image was created in April of 1998.
